chapter 7

chapter 7

The maid placed her daughter in a nest of grass beside the road and covered her with leaves.

Then she rose and ran back.

She collided with Master as he came charging after them.

She caught his arm. He flung her to the ground, so she wrapped both arms around his leg instead. He dragged her step by step across the earth.

She would not let go.

In this way, the maid dragged Master back toward the dead tree, leaving a long, winding trail of blood behind her.

With every step she moved farther from her daughter and closer to death.

Beneath the tree lay a fire striker she had hidden there earlier. With the last of her strength, she set the dead trunk alight.

She set herself alight.

She set the man she clung to alight.

And she kindled the path by which her daughter would live.

The blaze roared for days and nights, until the entire town and city could see it—until no one could pretend not to see.

The fire alarmed the Jade Emperor and Queen Mother of the West. They sent a holy monk down to the mortal realm to extinguish it, accompanied by his three disciples.

In truth, they had carried out this task countless times.

The holy monk knew they were probably being sent to rescue another ginseng-fruit tree.

He also knew that once they put out the fire and departed, ginseng fruits would again fall at the sight of gold. The fruit sellers would return.

The moment he entered the courtyard, the holy monk saw the dead tree.

It had withered entirely. Fire had charred its trunk and hollowed it out.

He could no longer tell whether it had once been a peach tree or a ginseng-fruit tree.

No living person remained in the courtyard. Only four resentful ghosts—two men and two women.

The first was a pale, handsome young man with lashes thick as little fans. Yet his manhood was no bigger than a grain of millet. It scarcely seemed that of a man.

He resented that he could not continue the family line. He resented his father and mother for failing to cure his defect.

He resented being a man, and resented even more that he was not man enough.

The person he hated most was not the trafficker who had sold him here, but his shabby, destitute birth mother.

If not for her, why would he suffer such a hidden illness? What good was a woman who could not bear a healthy child?

The second ghost was a woman whose face held no blood. A rope mark circled her neck. She was frighteningly thin, yet her belly bulged grotesquely.

She resented marrying the wrong man. She resented her carelessness when she secretly lay with another and conceived.

She had been fertile all along, yet to conceal her husband’s impotence, she had swallowed countless bitter medicines.

Her own child had been fed a fetus-turning pill and emerged neither properly male nor female. Then she bought a child, and he too was malformed.

So she bought another—this time not a child, but a woman.

The third resentful ghost was a man. His age could no longer be guessed, for his entire body had burned black.

He resented heaven for treating him unfairly. He resented his own carelessness, which had let a mere maid cost him his life.

He had possessed many women but never fathered a child of his own.

Now strangers had entered his house and dug around his tree, and that filled him with fresh resentment.

To continue one’s family line was only natural. He had wanted a son. What was wrong with that?

The fourth ghost…

What was the fourth ghost?

She resembled a person, yet also a tree.

A peach tree, and a ginseng-fruit tree.

Perhaps even she could no longer say what she was.

She had been only twenty-nine when she died, yet she felt inexplicably ancient.

Her life had stopped and begun to rot after the lantern festival she saw at eight years old.

After that came sale after sale, blow after blow. In the empty room, she watched a toothless, tongueless woman die in a lake of blood and remembered a sentence the woman had spoken—words she had not understood.

“The idea of women’s liberation is a scattering of sparks. Gather them, and they will set the eternal night ablaze.”

She lived within that eternal night.

The stolen futures of countless women were trapped there with her. Some stopped at eight. Some at eighteen. Some were swept into it from the moment of birth.

When she was sold into the mountain stronghold, she thought she might finally come back to life—might awaken from that night when she was eight.

Instead she witnessed another woman wither and die.

Both had believed that escaping one tiger’s den might make the next wolf’s lair a tolerable home.

If one insisted on calling it fortune, then she had been luckier. At least the man who shared her bed had not cut off her head.

Afterward, her life sank still deeper into the long night.

She thought she could work out the years of her bond and regain her freedom.

She served her mistress with all her heart, never knowing that in the woman’s eyes she was only a tool for keeping a husband—meat hung above a dog’s cage.

She watched her mistress buy a son. He was gentle as a child and close to her, but grew into a monster.

He lied, stole, cheated, drank, gambled, and whored until one day he died violently in the street.

Her mistress said a purchased child was bound to be diseased. Better to find a woman whose origins they knew.

From that day on, she knew she would never wake from the nightmare.

At last she became a ginseng-fruit tree that could not run, imprisoned in that courtyard forever and ever.

But she would make light break through the endless night.

She believed her daughter would be that tiny spark.

She sacrificed her life and took the courtyard and everyone in it with her, clearing every thorn from her daughter’s road.

In the turn of an eye, the daughter grew up.

She discovered dense lines of embroidery sewn into her swaddling cloth.

The next day, she bade farewell to her adoptive parents and set out.

The road was hard. She was only a mortal and could not summon a holy monk. She did not know where to begin searching for the ginseng fruits.

Still, she refused to give up, because she knew her mother’s soul remained trapped in that courtyard.

At last, I remembered everything.

“Holy monk,” I said, “please tear the dead tree out of this courtyard, roots and all.”

“You and the tree now share one root and one life,” he replied. “If we uproot it, your soul will scatter.”

But if it remained, everything that had happened over all those years would happen again.

More and more ginseng-fruit trees would be planted in this courtyard.

“Benefactress, yours is a righteous sacrifice,” the holy monk said.

Righteous?

I had never been righteous.

I was only an ordinary woman.

A woman with no other choice.

I wanted only to leave my daughter a safer, more peaceful world in which to live.

The female fruit nestled quietly against my chest and listened.

“Did you grow up well?” I asked her.

She nodded obediently. “I took the owner of a martial school as my master and learned the sword, spear, staff, and saber. I debated learning with the teacher at the academy and learned to read and write. My adoptive parents never bound my feet. I can travel ten thousand miles and see every mountain and river.”

No one, she said, could bind her body with an Immortal-Binding Rope.

No one could pin her roots with an Immortal-Fixing Nail.

No one could suppress her spirit with an Immortal-Suppressing Talisman.

Good.

That was good…

For a woman to grow freely was the truest declaration of war against fate—and the truest revenge.

The holy monk and his three disciples stood in the courtyard and tore the dead tree out by its roots.

Beneath the soil lay ginseng fruits packed too densely to count, tangled among the remnants of other trees’ roots.

“There are so many within our sight,” the holy monk sighed. “How many more lie where we cannot see?”

The eldest disciple drove his precious staff into the earth and dug three feet deep, yet could not unearth them all.

The second raked through the soil with his nine-toothed rake, tearing out root and branch, yet could not clear them all.

The third raised his demon-subduing staff and cowed the evil spirits, yet could not subdue them all.

The roots of ginseng-fruit trees in the human world were too dense, too wide, too deep.

The holy monk wiped sweat from his brow. “No matter. We will set out again. We will keep searching and keep uprooting them.”

One day, they would all be gone.

This wicked estate would crumble, piece by piece, into nothingness.

The female fruit jumped from my arms and ran toward the gate. Then she turned and waved.

“Your soul should never have been imprisoned here. Go!”

I waved back.

“Nor should yours. Go!”

Watching her retreating figure, I finally remembered laying my daughter in that nest of grass all those years ago, then turning and running back.

That was the first time the distance between us had grown.

Now came the second.

Across that widening space, there was only one thing to say:

Do not follow.

Ahead of you lie high mountains and open seas, a boundless earth beneath a distant sky.

Keep walking forward.

Do not follow me.

(The End)